The Dracula Dossier is a triumph. It may represent the first flowering of a new genre which will change how people play and how games are written.
What is The Dracula Dossier? It is a sandbox campaign for Night’s Black Agents by Ken Hite and co-written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. The campaign posits that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is actually the after-action report of an attempt by British Naval Intelligence to turn the eponymous bloodsucker into an agent of the crown. In the present day, the player characters are sent an unredacted copy of Dracula which includes annotations from agents who tried to turn Dracula against the fascists in 1940s Romania, pursued his moles in 1970s London, and tried to deploy him against al-Qaeda in the aughts. The characters must face off against Dracula himself and Operation Edom, the original intelligence organization tasked with “convincing” Dracula to take the King’s shilling.
Sandboxes are a very popular style of gaming because of the freedom they allow players. However, they are usually constricted geographically and small in scale. To say that the PCs may wander anywhere in a village looking for plot is one thing. To say the same thing of a whole world would be unmanageable for the GM. She simply cannot keep the entire Encyclopedia Britannica of her game world in her head in case the PCs decide to visit Djibouti.
The Pelgrane crew cut through this knot, first in The Armitage Files and now in The Dracula Dossier, by using a work of literature as the organizing principle of the campaign. The clues presented in Dracula provide an organization for the GM (She doesn’t need to know everything going on in Romania, just the interesting places mentioned in Dracula.) while at the same time providing maximum player freedom. Rather than scenes, the Dossier provides lists of people, places, and items for the PCs to encounter in their hunt for the fiend Dracula. This allows plot to emerge organically at the gaming table while allowing the scope of the campaign to be quite large.
Furthermore, the campaign provides not one version of people, places and things but three. In the character section, three versions of each NPC are provided, one wherein they are a member of Operation Edom, one wherein they are a minion of Dracula, and a third wild card option. For Abraham Van Helsing, each of these options presents immediate contradictions. In the novel, Van Helsing is obviously devoted to the destruction of Dracula, but if Van Helsing is a member of Edom, then he should have been trying to recruit the fiend, not end him. The authors put forth two different solutions to this quandary. First, Van Helsing may have been tasked with acquiring a vampire, any vampire for Edom.
After overseeing the transformation of Lucy Westenra, Dracula would be a loose end in need of tying, and it could become Van Helsing’s task to terminate the count with extreme prejudice. Alternately, Van Helsing is brought in as a cleaner after Edom has gone south. As a wild card option, Hite and Ryder-Hanrahan posit that there is a reason Van Helsing, while Dutch, exclaims in German whenever excited. Van Helsing could be the Kaiser’s man, and working for German intelligence.
The astonishing quality of the ideas presented in The Dracula Dossier makes it standout in a crowded field of RPG products. All too often in books the scale of the Dossier, the author’s imagination has difficulty keeping pace with the required word count. Yes, there will be good ideas, but they will be oases between barren deserts of wench-infested inns and orc-ridden crypts. But Hite and Ryder-Hanrahan’s imaginations do not crack under the weight. The ingenuity on display in the Dossier is so extraordinary that this product would be of use to GMs running a horror or supernatural campaign set anytime between the Victorian era and today. It could be used in Vampire: The Requiem as a campaign wherein characters look for the founder of the Ordo Dracul, to throw out one example.
True flaws are hard to find in The Dracula Dossier, but it’s worth noting this may not be a product for beginners. A lot of support for beginning GMs is present in the text, such as the scenario spines and detailed descriptions of techno-thriller story beats, but the volume of material and its flexibility is such that the novice GM may wish to steer clear. Furthermore, GMs uncomfortable with the make-it-up-as-you-go, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants nature of the sandbox may find the Dossier is not their pint of O negative. Also, I cannot comment on the style of the book as the version I reviewed was pre-layout, hence my current ranking of 3.
Aristotle said that the best endings are both inevitable and surprising. The sandbox campaign with a literary work at its core is a format designed to generate endings both inevitable but surprising to all. No one truly knows how a given Dracula Dossier campaign will end at its start, but the suspension of disbelief generated by the participatory nature of a role-playing game means that with hindsight, whatever end reached will seem inevitable. And a good ending, whether in fiction or gaming, is worth its weight in blood. Given that only two products have thus far used this structure, it is far from played out. It will be interesting to see how other companies and writers may use it and respond to it. A sandbox campaign with a written work as its spine for Dungeons & Dragons or 13th Age would be a thing to see.
In summary, The Dracula Dossier is a tour-de-force by writers working at the top of their game. It is a new height in Pelgrane’s innovative style of campaign which uses a text as the organizing principle of a sandbox, one which may spawn earnest imitators and could over time evolve into its own genre.
Full Disclosure: I was given a pre-layout copy of The Director's Handbook from the Dracula Dossier so that I could review it on my podcast, Plot Points, with my co-hosts (Check it out here, as well as on iTunes and Stitcher: http://plotpoints.libsyn.com/28-the-dracula-dossier). Other than free review copies, I have received no payment from Pelgrane Press.
